


what falls away is always (and is near)

by parcequelle



Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Originally Posted on LiveJournal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-12
Updated: 2009-11-12
Packaged: 2017-10-22 12:25:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/237988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parcequelle/pseuds/parcequelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She sometimes thinks she's spent too long out here. ('Judgment Day' fix-it fic.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	what falls away is always (and is near)

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers up to and including 6.01 'Last Man Standing.' Title pilfered shamelessly from Emily Dickinson.

Jenny stands at the window, hip tilted into the sill, and smokes a cigarette because she can. She doesn't usually smoke, doesn't like the taste or the smell or the feel of it, has never felt the need to hold something so useless in her hands, but things are different, now, since that day.

She shouldn't be here, but she trusts this man in a way that she's trusted few others, he hasn't breathed a word of her secret to a soul alive or dead, and she knows she made the right decision in coming. They have settled into a quiet routine of something not quite chivalrous; they don't go out together, often -- one of them always likes to stay behind to guard the house, just in case. It's overkill, out here, but it's the habit of a lifetime and a half to both of them, and when they're together they slide back into the old ways without intention or even, most of the time, realisation. When they do leave the house, he walks beside her -- half a step to the right, half a step to the front -- and shields her body from what the locals believe is the sun or the traffic, what he and she both know is more. But they don't go out together, often; she can't be seen with him just as much as he can't be seen with her, and the people around this place might mind their own business, but they still notice things, and Jenny isn't a woman who can afford to be noticed.

Things change, she thinks, idly, as she watches a seagull dip and skim across the rolling water. Things change and times passes, day into night, light into dark, and all of it comes in and goes out with the tide. She has time for such deliberations, now that her life is full to the brim with nothingness, with empty mornings and Spanish verbs and tumblers of bourbon that taste of a different time. She has the time to play philosopher, to indulge herself in things she's always believed to be a waste, but she's never been made to live this kind of life.

It's funny, she thinks, ironic, how she always thought she'd died the way she didn't.

As of this evening, she'll have been here two months, a length of time that yawns into her sense of awareness with a thought, an association she can't pretend she doesn't see. Two months, she thinks. Eight weeks. It feels like too long ago, now, like this day and this time, when it comes, will mark a stretch of her new existence that can never be reconciled to the old, even if she wants it to, which she isn't sure she does. But Jenny, for all her failings, is far from foolish, far from dim, and she is under no illusions that her personal history -- that anyone's personal history -- can never, regardless of effort, be escaped. It can be submerged, it can be forgotten, it can be chased around the world and lost in thought and drowned in gin, but it can't be escaped. It's always there, beneath the skin that can't ever be shed; always lurking, always stuck to her like the sand in her toes. She doesn't wear shoes, out here, and in their absence the soles of her feet have grown rough and strong. Like compensation, she thinks; her body adjusting, still thanking her every day for forcing it to walk up stairs in heels.

Jenny takes a last, long drag of the cigarette (not hers; she still doesn't buy things herself -- maybe one day, but not today) and butts it out against the sand-riddled wood of the window pane beside her. Attuned as she is to his presence, to the tiniest of movements around her in this house of space and time, she feels him in the room with her before either of them speaks, feels his gaze wander casually up her legs and over her hips and her back.

She turns her head, enough to catch his eye with a smirk, and asks him, "Really? What have I said to you about staring at my ass?" Her voice is scratchy, hollow and strange in her ears, dry with underuse. She doesn't know if she'll ever grow accustomed to speaking so little, when her words were an asset that served her so well for so long.

It's the most he's said to her in hours, either, but it's a good thing to say. She can get behind this kind of communication. She smiles at him, teasing. "Why put off until this evening what we can do now?" But she doesn't move from her place at the window, and he sets the bottle down on the table, walks over to stand behind her. He respects her space, stands close but not touching. It doesn't go unnoticed. "I don't suppose you want a cigarette?" she asks, but she knows what the answer will be. He chuckles, throatily, and she hears him light a cigar from behind her, feels more than sees him turn his face away to expel the first puff.

"You don't need to do that, you know," she tells him gently, and she twists her head around to look at his eyes but finds them hazy, set far away from hers, out on the horizon. "It doesn't bother me anymore."

"I know," he says, "but it's bad for you. Don't want you to -- you know." He waves a hand in her general direction, which she translates to mean 'inhale my passive smoke and die of lung cancer'. She's fluent in his particular art of non-verbal communication, though most of that has little to do with the time she's spent out here.

She looks up at him, then, amused by his unexpected display of gruff consideration. "You do realise I'm fine? That I've been fine for quite a while now?"

"Only you," he snorts, "would call a month 'a while'. You're as bad as Gibbs."

"You should know," she retorts, and he glances at her, then; it is lost on neither of them that this is the first time they've mentioned him since she's arrived. "You taught him, he taught me. This is fitting, somehow."

"So it is." He huffs out a laugh and presses his warm, large-fingered hand into her bare shoulder; strokes it softly, once, then pulls his hand away -- it's only a small gesture of comfort or of support, she isn't sure which, but it's an unusual one for him to make either way. She can feel the rough graze of his callouses on her skin even after he's broken contact, and she wants to look back up at him, to search out his face and work out what he's thinking, but she stops herself and just keeps looking outside at the waves.

Time passes, unmeasured, and then he says, "You can't seriously wear that and expect me not to look, can you? Come on, Jenny, give a man a break."

And she grins, because this is something she can handle; this is familiar ground. She isn't sure what passed between them just then, if anything even did -- she sometimes thinks she spends too much time alone, out here, by the sea, with only Mike and the gulls and the pretty young Mexican delivery girl for company -- but it's gone just as soon as it's come, and Mike is already back to his usual self, flirting badly with her because it entertains him when he's bored and he has no intention of actually trying to seduce her. She waits until she hears him step out of the room before she casts a glance down at her body, allows herself a smile as she privately concedes his point. She's in a sarong, wrapped around her lower half and loosely secured with a knot of material resting below her hipbone, and a bikini.

She lives on the beach, goddammit, in a house that is more like a hut with a man whose only standing appointment is with the sangria at the cantina up the road. She's allowed to wear a bikini if she wants to, and she wants to; she can't go anywhere, do anything, live the life of a normal person, and the illness -- brief though it was; not entirely manufactured, but blown out of proportion enough to provide her a solid backup -- has changed her body in a way that makes her more aware of its shape. She's always been petite, but she's lost weight in the last few months, her only source of amusement exercise and alcohol, and Jenny has always appreciated balance. The heat strips away her appetite, too, always has; she's never been thinner than she was when she was caught in the dry heat of Cairo, or when she was staked out in Colombia in midsummer.

Mike hasn't mentioned the scar tissue that stretches faintly over the flesh where the curve of her waist meets her hip. Don't ask and don't tell, is the policy here; Mike isn't one to pry, she knows, and he's had enough experience to recognise the signs of physical torture when he sees them. She doesn't doubt that he bears similar marks on his own body, though perhaps they're less visible under the tan of his skin and his hair, but he doesn't ask and he doesn't tell and Jenny is grateful for that. She's been able to pass it off as the result of a burn from an iron, a clumsy accident -- all her fault, she'd joke, if someone lacked finesse enough to ask -- leaving her with a mark to forever remind her of why technology, surely, will one day be the death of them all.

She's surprised at the number of people who bought that story, given her job, but it doesn't matter anymore; she doesn't suppose that she'll ever see any of them again. This is her life, now; Mexico, Mike and the sea, cigarettes and sangria and sand. Two months in and she isn't bored, exactly, but she does sometimes feel that she's still Director Shepard, skipped out on an indefinite holiday, who'll have to go back to her old life and her old responsibilites any minute. But she's stopped waiting for the phone to ring, stopped waiting for someone to knock on the door and tell her she's needed urgently back at the Navy Yard, stopped waiting for Cynthia's smile to duck into a doorway and tell her she's needed. She's stopped expecting Gibbs to come barging in through the door -- demanding answers, commanding attention, flaunting authority in that macho, gusto, compelling way that he's had since the dawn of time.

Jenny thinks of him often, though not in any great detail or depth. He is merely a recurring theme in her idle stream-of-consciousness, a memory spanned wide, inconsistent but lasting, intense, over more than ten years of her life. She's stopped reliving conversations they had (and those they didn't), stopped picturing him at work and wondering what he's getting up to, though she does admit to taking a certain pleasure in thinking of how he must be driving Deputy -- Director -- Vance crazy. Vance, who'd have no idea how to handle him, when to push him and when to let him go, when to listen to him and when to shut him up. She'd be willing to bet serious money that Vance has already resorted to standard measures of discipline, formal reprimands and stern, testerone-fuelled talkings-to, the kind of which would not only amuse Gibbs but probably encourage him.

She likes to think, to herself, that Gibbs might be acting up worse than he usually would out of some sweet but twisted sense of respect for her memory. She likes to think that she knows Gibbs well enough to predict the way he'd honour the way she went down. She certainly knows him better than to want or expect overt displays of emotion -- she doesn't want much; she knows she screwed up and knows that he knows that by now, but she does hope -- quietly, wistfully, in the intersteces of these moments -- that Jethro might remember her with a smile.

There are things she'd say to him, now, if she could, but she doesn't waste her energy on regret.

She hears a shuffle outside, the sound of sandals scraping over the sand-littered panels of Mike's not-quite-patio, and she turns away from the window, slipping soundlessly through the kitchen to where Mike is seated, hunched over, engaged in a staring competition with a small, rusty, cylindrical tin of varnish. "Come 'ere, young Jenny, and tell me what you think of this."

She steps into the room but doesn't come close enough to look over his shoulder; when he glances up, she jerks a thumb in the direction of the front door. "There's someone at the--" She's interrupted by the sound of the knock and shoots him a wry smile. "I think it's for you."

Jenny looks up at the aging clock hung crookedly over the kitchen sink, mentally accounts for the fact that it's running sixteen minutes late, and frowns. The delivery girl -- Carla, she thinks; maybe Carmen? -- is a half-hour late, today. It's unusual. Alarmism is an enemy of the territory, but caution is natural; Jenny wonders, considers, processes, the cogs of her analytical mind well-trained if out of practice, and she slips through the side of the door out the back, crouches low as she moves around the edge of house, clothes herself in afternoon shadow. She waits in silence, heart pounding, breath shallow, until she hears the door swing closed behind Mike and his visitor, hears Mike bark a sharp laugh and cry, "Probie!"

She feels the blood drain from her face, feels the wind as it breathes through the hair on the back of her neck, on her arms, like a warning she's willing to hear. She's known that this could happen from the moment she dared to shirk responsibility and set foot in Mexico; she and Mike have talked about this, have planned for this moment, though they never went so far as to mention his name. (Mike had told her: "There's only one other person, besides you, who knows that I'm here. There's only one other person who'd dare to come."

She'd nodded sharply, once, all business; this had been early in her stay here, when she still hadn't shed her Director skin enough to relate to Mike Franks on a social level. "I understand," she'd said. "We'll have a system of notification, for if it happens. He won't call ahead."

She'd said that just as Mike had said, "He'll catch us off-guard, if he comes," and she'd nodded again.

"Distress word," she'd said. "What'll it be?"

He'd answered without even thinking, as soon as she'd asked.)

*

_Probie._

*

She sits in the long, dark shadows of the shed out the back of Mike's house, her body obscured by a rusty wheelbarrow full of dead plants, and waits to be found. She's given up running; gave up, in fact, as soon as she got to where she's sitting now, when she realised that if Gibbs is here, in Mexico, standing unannounced and unexpected on Mike Franks' doorstep while Jenny Shepard, supposedly two months dead, sits out the back, it's a pretty safe bet that running's no longer a viable option. Everything she owns -- a pair of boots, a set of fake IDs, a gun -- are in a bag inside Mike's house, anyway, and she's not about to race across Mexico in a sarong.

She hopes it'll be Mike, who comes, but doesn't ever really think it will be. When she hears the sound of his footsteps, climbing the hill beside her, she can't find the energy to run, or hide, or even pretend to be surprised. She's done with running. She's isn't wearing any shoes.

He steps around the side of the shed without a word, a solid, looming figure, his hair a corona of light in the sun. She doesn't look at him, her legs tucked up into her chest like a child's. "What took you so long to find me? Two whole months -- are you losing your touch?"

"Hello, Jen."

"What did you do to the delivery girl?" she demands.

Gibbs raises an eyebrow. "Nothing."

"Jethro."

She feels the way he watches her for a moment, before he says, "I just asked her a couple of questions. She was very co-operative and -- don't look at me like that, Jen, I promise she's still in one piece. I'm not Ziva."

Jenny feels a pang at the mention of Ziva's name; out of place, sudden; hearing it spoken with such familiar understanding makes her miss the sight of that smirk, that confident swagger, that quick-thinking competence that has kept her amused and saved her life -- saved both of their lives, no doubt -- so many times. She smiles, gently, but still won't meet Gibbs' eyes. "How is Ziva?"

"Good, last I heard."

"Last you heard?"

"She's back with Mossad. Back in Israel." He lets out a puff of air, the only physical sign of annoyance he'll let himself show. Still, Jenny notices. Old habits die hard. "Vance sent her home."

"He what?" she says. "What for?"

He ignores her. "DiNozzo is, as we speak, aboard the Seahawk. Six-month assignment as Agent Afloat."

"Tony," Jenny murmurs, incredulous. "On a boat. Oh my God. What the hell is he--"

"McGee," he interrupts, "has been reassigned to the Cybercrimes unit, and is now living in the basement. Sub-basement." he frowns, shakes his head. "Basement, whatever."

"Jethro." She stares at him. "You're making this up."

"You really think i'd be able to come up with 'Cybercrime' all on my own, Jen?"

She inclines her head to the side, conceding. "Fair point. now, Jethro, you have to tell me how--" But she finds herself cut off, Jethro's fingers pressed over her lips as he crouches in front of her, and she resists the urge to bite him for being so damned condescending.

"Later, Jen," he says, with a gentleness that grates on her nerves. "We have time, and more important things to discuss right now."

"Such as?"

"Such as," he says, steadily, "the fact that I'm pretty sure two months ago you got shot. I'm pretty sure Ducky did an autopsy, declared you definitely, clinically dead, the permanent kind, and that if I were to go back to NCIS right now and tell any given person that we'd just had this conversation, they'd think I was a bit of a headcase. And I gotta say, Jen, that given most of the evidence, I'm pretty sure I'd think they were right."

Jenny watches him, says nothing. What can she say? She's never come back from the dead, before today.

"Funny thing, though," Gibbs continues, dropping to the ground to sit beside her, his back to the shed, "is that I could've sworn you were real." He reaches out to touch her, fingers brushing warm against her cheek, a wisp of a touch before they're gone again and Jenny's skin is burning in their absence. "Look at that," he says, soft, intense. "You are. Who knew?"

She doesn't know if it's rhetorical -- she's still trying to process the thought of Jethro here in front of her, flesh and blood, real and alive; the irony of that not lost on her for a moment -- so she shakes her head and treats it as a question. Always better to do that, she's found, when dealing with Gibbs. "You never believed for a second I was dead."

He watches her, coolly, scrutinising. "That a question or a statement, Jen?"

"It's a fact." She holds his gaze. She says, "I know you, Jethro. you wouldn't be here unless--"

"Unless what?"

"--unless you had a damn good reason for coming, and I don't buy that this visit has nothing to do with me."

"That's awful narcissistic of you, Jen."

"You trying to tell me it's a coincidence that you show up to Mike Franks' house on a beach in Mexico on a day that I happen to be here?"

That's stumped him, and she smirks, victorious. "I didn't think so."

"Jen," he says suddenly, exasperated, and he grimaces as he flicks at the brim of the sunhat she grabbed on her way out the door. "Would you take this off? We're in the shade, and you look like a--"

"What?"

"--I don't know, one of those crazy old women who gives those things -- you know, to those birds that do the -- what?"

"Jethro--" Jenny's starting to laugh, and it's a foreign feeling, a bubble of pressure up against her ribcage, the kind she feels she hasn't felt in years, "--what the hell are you _talking_ about?"

He glares at her and reaches out to pick up a stick off the ground; he starts poking the sand at his feet, digging holes and then re-filling them, drawing maps of things she can't identify. Must be a Marine thing, she thinks; not the drawing or even the sand, but the instinct to seek out available resources nearby and put them to some sort of use. She watches the movements of his hands, deft and strong, as he carves out nonsense words in the pile of grains.

"What happened, Jen?" he asks suddenly, moments later, lifting his eyes to meet hers. "What happened that you couldn't come to me?"

She opts for safety, the truth disguised. "You know what happened," she says. "I screwed up in Russia, Decker paid for it, we were next. I had to stop him but I couldn't do it alone, and I couldn't do it as Agency Director."

"So you faked your own death?"

"I didn't--" she stops herself, closes her eyes, doesn't open them until she's turned away. "It doesn't matter, Jethro. It's over. You're here. And why are you asking me, anyway? Mike's already told you what he knows."

"Why do you think that?"

She whips her head around to look sharply at him, brow creased. "He trusts you," she says.

Gibbs shrugs. "He trusts you."

She studies him, calculating, before she finally shakes her head. "I don't buy it, Jethro. He's already told you."

He shrugs again, expansively, and gives her a look she can't quite identify, almost -- _amused_. He leans in close and speaks into the shell of ear, lips brushing her hair. She's kept it growing, the last two months, and it sits a good few inches below her shoulders. "I think you've spent too much time out here on your own, Jen. You're starting to forget how to read people." He makes to move away from her, but she grabs onto the collar of his shirt and tugs him forward. The anger, directed at someone for the first time in too long, is a rush.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

He holds her eyes with that steady, infuriating calm he gets when he thinks he knows what's going on -- and usually does, damn him -- and murmurs one word. "Mike."

"What about him?"

He leans into her body again, and this time when she feels his lips press her cheek on their way to her ear, she knows it isn't an accidental touch. She fights down a squirm, forces herself to stay calm as his meaning winds up into her consciousness. "Mike," he tells her, and his fingers graze along hers; it's nothing, it's barely a touch, it's agonising and entirely too much, and Jenny wants to scream in frusration, "is in love with you."

She hears it, understands it, rejects it. She shakes her head against his, leaves her temple where it is when she brushes against him. "He isn't," she murmurs. "He isn't. He's lonely, that's all."

"He told me, Jenny."

"He didn't."

Her eyes are still closed against the sun, against reality and this man with the power and nerve to upset her existence, but she wrenches them tighter together still. They are speaking in whispers, too close to need anything more, Gibbs' right arm stretched out over her thighs to maintain his balance, and he leans into her, hardly touching, the hem of his cotton shirt a distracting flicker against her bare stomach. She remembers, then, that she's wearing a bikini, and wonders how she forgot that until now.

Self-consciousness isn't something in her nature, hasn't been for most of her adult life, and she doesn't flinch; but it only takes him a moment to notice the way she arrests her movement, holds her breath. He pulls back to study her face, raises his eyebrows in a wordless question.

Jenny doesn't answer, but asks him, instead, "How did you get here, Jethro?"

"I flew."

 

She narrows her eyes.  


"Okay," he says, "we're playing this the serious way." He takes a breath, lets it out, and tells her, "I quit, Jen."

"You quit."

"Quit," he says. "Left. Resigned. Retired."

"I know what it means, Jethro, but you don't exactly have a history of retiring and meaning it."

"Hey," he protests. "I did mean it, last time, I just -- changed my mind."

She eyes him tolerantly. "Uh-huh."

"Look," he says, twists to the side to show her the side of his belt -- no badge, no agency-issued weapon -- then twists back and shrugs. "Retired," he says again. "For good."

"Why now?"

He gives her a significant look, the kind that -- even after so long, after so much time spent versing herself in Gibbs-speak -- makes her wants to reassess everything she thought she'd known for sure until this moment. Then he says, "There's nothing left for me there, anymore, Jen," and she isn't any closer to understanding this ridiculous, impossible man than she has ever been. Is he saying what she thinks he's saying? It's been a while, it's been a hundred different lifetimes, it's been twelve years, eight weeks, ten minutes, but if Jenny Shepard trusts anything it's her instincts.

"Jethro," she says, slowly, doing her best to ignore the smirk playing over his lips, the way he's running his nails with maddeing lightness over her wrist. "How did you know I was here?"

He doesn't answer; just watches her, head titled, waiting for her to answer her own question, which she does almost as soon as she's asked it. "Ducky," she breathes.

"Ducky," Gibbs confirms. "You were smart, not to tell him what you were doing, or I would'a found you a whole lot sooner."

"So how did you -- oh," she says, as realisation dawns. "The tests. You used the tests." She casts him a look, vaguely amused, vaguely impressed, not at all surprised by his persistence or ingenuity. "And used highly illegal means to obtain them, I assume?"

"Just doing my job," he says. "All part of the investigative process."

"Oh, right, of course. Tell me, Jethro, do you always feel it appropriate to go through your superiors' private medical records?"

"Only the dead ones, Jen," he says, and she looks away.

"Ducky kept what he knew to himself," he says, "so don't go thinking he betrayed your trust. He didn't."

"I didn't think that. I know Ducky."

"And you know me."

"Do I? Wouldn't have expected you to say that and believe it, Jethro."

"You knew I knew you weren't really dead. You knew I was going to show up here eventually. You knew Mike gave me the lowdown when I got here."

"I knew it!" she exclaims, and he nods.

"Just said that, Jen."

"Yes," she murmurs. "So you figured it out. My master plan."

He shrugs, then admits, after a moment, "It was Mike. Knew something was up when I saw him after the diner. Plus, you know, the whole not-seeing-your-body thing kinda gave it away."

"I've been meaning to ask you, actually. How _did_ he get around that?"

He grins, a flash of brightness before it's gone again, and he tells her, "Better left unsaid, Jen."

"Patronising bastard," she says, but she hears the fondness creep into her own voice. She feels like she's back again, living inside her own body after two months renting space in someone else's, and the warmth of familiarity slides through her veins like a drug, like relief. She watches him, intently, and something else curls in the pit of her stomach, deep and hot.

He tosses the stick aside and stands, abrupt, looks down on her expectantly. "Come on," he says, and that's all it takes to lose the moment. "We're leaving."

She cocks an eyebrow up at him, sarcastic. Doesn't move. "OIh," she drawls out, "we're leaving, are we? And where might be we going on this fictional outing, Jethro?"

"Home," he says. "DC."

She'd laugh, but her smile is false enough that it does the trick, she thinks, as she watches Jethro's minute shift in expression. It's confidence flipped to a kind of impatient concern, and it comforts her to know that she can still read him the way she always could, even after these months spent apart -- not the longest stretch of time, for certain, or even the greatest distance, but the emotional, ideological gap is unmatched. "You know I can't do that, Jethro," she says, and gestures toward the house. "In case you hadn't noticed, this thing is a little bigger than me digging my heels in just to be difficult."

"You mean like that time in Prague?" he demands, eyes narrowing as he points an accusatory finger in her face. "When you wouldn't leave that minister's office even though we knew he'd left for the night and we didn't even need to be tailing him?"

"Petulant but effective," Jenny admits with a shrug. She grins up at him. "Really pissed you off, and also, if I remember correctly, and--" she holds up a hand, stopping his retort before it can start, "--I think that I do -- that stakeout ended up tipping us off to the guy who was actually moving the money, did it not?"

Gibbs' mouth is open, his brows creased in frustration at her words, and he glares at her for a few long seconds before he seems to recall that she's immune. "You," he sputters, "you refused to pack up our surveillance equipment -- you _disobeyed an order_ \--"

"Your order," she mutters, which he ignores; she'd expect no less.

"--because you were too caught up in your petty, immature, unprofessional little--"

"Oh, right," she interjects hotly, " _I_ was the one being unprofessional. So that night the week after, when we caught up with Hošák as he was trying to cross the border into Austria -- you remember, don't you, Jethro? -- I suppose _that_ was SOP for celebration of a job well done. I suppose you do that with Ziva, maybe DiNozzo on occasion?"

"Well, maybe I do."

"And McGee?"

They glare at each other, unblinking, an age-old stand-off that they've fought together a hundred times before this, both lost and won -- though usually drawn -- and usually ending with a screaming match that left one of them fuming alone while the other stalked out of the room, muttering curses. At least, that's how it's been since Jenny made a decision and wrote a letter and they could no longer adopt their tried and tested method of resolving conflict, which had less to do with talking than it did with grabbing each other and finding the nearest empty closet, or car, or wall, or floor, and making up the old-fashioned way.

They reach a stalemate soon enough, neither backing down, Jenny's eyes beginning to water with the effort of holding them open. Then it happens -- a reflex, a twitch, a flash of movement she probably only catches because she's been staring directly at him with nothing to block her vision for over a minute, but she sees it, and she sees it for what it is: Gibbs just smiled. He _smiled_ , and the realisation makes Jenny smile, too, and then they are both doubled over with laughter, overwhelmed by the utter ridiculousness of their current situation, of the fact that Jenny's dead and they're still fighting. The sudden sound scatters the birds in a tree near the shed, and Jenny leans her head back against the cool, pannelled iron behind her, and thinks that life cannot get more absurd than this.

"God, Jen." Gibbs heaves a sigh, still catching his breath, and slides back down the wall to reclaim his place beside her, reaches out and wraps his arm around her shoulder, tugs her in. She doesn't protest, weak with laughter and emotion and the aftershock of seeing of him again, and tilts her head into the crook of his neck and shoulder, feels the warmth of his skin through his shirt, his collarbone jutting out into her cheek. "Jen," he says, again, a whisper, so low she almost misses it. She feels him ghost a kiss to the top of her head. "I'm so glad you're alive."

"So am I," she tells him, and it's true for the first time in weeks. "Today, right now, so am I."

He sighs again, stirring her hair, and she relaxes into his shoulder, feels the way his fingers curl into the dip of her waist.

She inhales, exhales. Slows her heartrate. She says: "But I'm not coming back to DC."

He says, "No."

"I mean it, Jethro, I'm not -- wait." She stops, pulls away. "I'm not."

"No, you're not. But you are coming with me."

"Am I, now."

He looks at her, lip curled up in an almost-smile. "Yep."

"And where are we going?"

"Home."

"Jethro." Disbelieving, she stares. "My house has been no more than a pile of ash and rubble for the past two months, or didn't you get that memo?"

"I set it on fire, Jen. I know that."

She cocks her head at him, mock-surprised. "So home would be--?"

"Home," he says, and taps his fingers twice against his knee, as though that provides her with an adequate explanation.

Jenny sighs, long-suffering. "Jethro," she says again, "I do not care if the whole world thinks I'm dead and you're crazy -- I am not about to let you hold me hostage in your basement with no windows."

"It has windows!" he protests.

"Windows that are boarded over, Jethro, do not count."

He twists his face, unimpressed, in her general direction. "Doesn't matter, anyway," he tells her. "I'm not talking about my basement." He looks back at her, then, intently, and the banter of moments earlier is immediately dissolved; he holds her gaze, sharing secrets, telling stories -- asking permission, it almost seems -- before he speaks. "My boat," he says, so softly that the afternoon breeze almost swallows it up. "I'm talking about my boat, Jen."

"Your boat," she echoes, slowly, to buy herself time. There are only two possible meanings behind what he's saying, and she's pretty sure one of them has been effectively eliminated in the discussion of her moving into the basement. She's pretty sure she knows what Jethro is asking her -- offering her -- but the world doesn't work the way it used to, now, and she goes for logistics. "Your boat, I assume, is in water?"

"It is."

"And it -- you know, it floats?"

"Of course it _floats_." He looks mildly offended, then seems to recall that he's built more than one boat that has mysteriously disappeared after its completion, and that she has no reason to know or believe that it -- that any of them -- survived. "It's entirely seaworthy," he assures her, ticking off points on his fingers. "It floats. It doesn't leak." He scans her body up and down, lingers a moment too long at her hips, and pronounces, "You'll fit."

She slaps him on the back of the head. He is speechless; she approves, so she runs her fingers through the hair at the back of his neck, which confuses him. She approves more. "Inappropriate inspections of my body aside," she says, "you'd better think about this seriously, Jethro. I don't exist. I can't afford to be seen or recognised by anyone anywhere. What you're suggesting ... we'll be on a boat," she tells him. "Together." She raises her eyebrows, seeking evidence of his comprehension of this. "You realise that if you decide you want to get rid of me three months in, you won't just be able to go hide out in your basement and then file for divorce?"

"Yeah," Gibbs says, "because we won't be married."

"There's that," Jenny says, "and there's the fact that we'll be alone at sea. No land, no people, Jethro -- just us. You and me. No-one else. For a very long time."

"That a technical term of measurement, there, Jen?"

"Jethro," she frowns. "Act your age."

He looks exasperated. "What's your point?"

"I thought it worth mentioning that you might need to be prepared to throw me overboard, or something, if you change your mind. Also, you should be aware that even though I'm dead, I still have a gun, I still know how to use it, and I don't intend to go down without a fight. So if you do decide to kill me -- you've been warned." She shrugs. "That's it."

"That's it?" he asks, but his lip is twitching upwards, blue eyes bright.

She thinks for a moment, finds nothing else of interest to say, and nods. "That's it."

"I'm glad to hear it, Jen," he says, and kisses her.


End file.
